Lost Smart Cat configutration

Lou KI5FTY

Hi I had trouble connecting to my rig because of some network issues. When I did get connected all of my smart cat definitions were gone. All set back to default. Has anyone seen this? Where are they stored and can they be backed up?

Tim - W4TME

Once you have your CAT ports defined, save the %APPDATA%\FlexRadio Systems\CAT.settings file to a safe place.

To recover, copy it back to the location listed above and restart CAT and wait as it may take a little time for virtual serial ports to get created if they do not exist.

Ed W2MKM

Lou,

I just had a similar issue yesterday 12/26/20. I had spent the morning configuring my 6700 (SSDR v3.1.12 Win10 Personsal) and N1MM and MMTTY and 2-Tone for next weeks RTTY Roundup, so lots of playing around with the DAX channels for audio.

After that started up SliceMaster 6000 and the PC Blue Screen Of Death (BSODs) on me and when booting back up all of my SmartCAT entries (about 7 of them as I am configured for SO2R and digital modes etc) and just a single new CAT port (Com13) and new TCP Port 5002 presumably the defaults where in the SmartCat list.

Win10 Device Manager however still shows all of the pre-existing CAT ports previously created by SmartCAT. Been on the Community for last hour researching the problem and found this article though I haven't yet tried to resolve

https://helpdesk.flexradio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200883925-Removing-Hidden-or-Ghosted-Com-ports

Curious as to how to avoid if possible and quickly restore .. I'm guilty of not having a backed up profile as the 6700 is relatively new and curious if that would help with recovery ..

I will let you know how I make out with the recovery.

73, Ed W2MKM

Ed W2MKM

Lou,

I think I found it ....

See Tim's article below as it describes exactly what happened on my end, I will attempt the fix later today and advise.

https://helpdesk.flexradio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004248471-How-to-Re-associate-CAT-ports-with-Virtual-Serial-Ports-

Good Luck

73, Ed W2MKM

Lou KI5FTY

I think you are right but it is not the solution I was looking for... My TCP connections are gone also, and I did not document my config. 

 I was hoping for a solution that would rebuild the config from the ports.

Ronald Panetta

Lou, agree this simply cleans up the ports and does not address your concerns of CAT config recovery. I have lost my CAT config twice. I now have an MS Word doc with screen captures of each CAT "port". Window's "Snipit" tool is great for capturing a graphic of each CAT "port".

Lou KI5FTY

@Tim - W4TME thanks!

marco rinaldi

hey guys you can also recover previous versions of your cat ports, lost for any reasons, by reaching the %APPDATA%\FlexRadio Systems\CAT.settings, as tim suggested.

in case you didn't save the working .setting, you can always use the windows feature "previous versions" by right click on the needed file...

just worked fine for me

73, marco

James Del Principe

I wish I had known about Tim's document before the upgrade. I had written them all down prior to the upgrade but after a factory reset, they all disappeared as expected. I had hoped to just recreate them but did not know how. After some efforts I went in to device manager and saw that all com ports had two, one in bold and one greyed out. That is for example there would be a Com 4 shown normal and a com 4 greyed out. I used device manager to delete all the greyed out ports. But these would not work for their previous applications. Logger 32 would not use its previous com 9. I made a com 11 and that worked fine.

For Winlink VARA, it used to be com port 8. When I tried to use that again, I got the message "Access to Com Port denied". I tried com 9 which had previously been assigned to Logger 32 and it gave me the same message. The only way to reconnect was to create new port numbers and then use these. It was successful in all cases except one.

FLDIGI was port 6. However, that port does not show up in the FLDIGI app. Only ports 10, 11, 12 and 104 to 110 are available. Since 11 and 12 are used by other apps they are out and as for port 10, it is not in Smart CAT. So my question is how to get an available port in Smart CAT over to FLDIGI? In Smart CAT, you cannot just create any old port number you wish.... or am I wrong about that.

FLDIGI is the last app to make work. I sure would like the frequency to track with the radio. Any thoughts? Many thanks, Jim

Mike-VA3MW

@James Del Principe

So sorry about that. Sadly, that doesn't really help you out at all.

What you might want to do is look at each application and see what com port it expects to be using. Then, see if you can match them up as you create them in SmartSDR CAT.

If it was me, I would just create them as you need them, write them down and then go through each application and change them to the number you need.

I suspect that is what you are doing already.

(I will be so glad when we don't need RS232 ports anymore and they will use LAN connections. FLDigi does that already with FLRig)

73

James Del Principe

Thanks for the fast reply, Mike. I look at each app and it will have a list of apps it thinks are present whether they are already in use or not. Then I pick one that is NOT in use, just as you said. But in FLDIGI, it does not see any more ports that I create. Initially it only saw port 10 for some odd reason. After countless tries and reboots, it now sees 10,11, 12 and 104 to 110. I can't use those and I can't seem to create a new port and then have FLDIGI see it. I wonder if this is a fault in FLDIGI? Probably ...but how to correct it?

Yes !!! I will be dancing in the streets when we use LAN connections! Thanks again, Jim KD1I

Matt NQ6N

I had the problem of configuration being lost and also the problem of SmartCAT taking forever to open and I fixed it by turning off the Windows 10 feature that automatically synchronizes roaming profile data.

I am using Windows 10 Professional in a home/shack environment and it is not connected to a domain, but I think Microsoft tries to synchronize certain data via OneDrive even if the user is not using OneDrive, but turning off that setting lets the PC be independent from other PCs that the user logs into with the same Microsoft account.

I believe I also have had some peculiar settings loss with N1MM logger for the same reason.

73,

Matt NQ6N